


anything past the horizon

by eustassya



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Not Superheroes, Arc Reactor Issues, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, M/M, NOT MCU TIMELINE COMPLIANT, Not Iron Man 2 Compliant, Not Iron Man 3 Compliant, POV Tony, essentially they bond over trauma and tech issues, his metal arm gives him issues too, ptsd tony
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 23:20:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7911469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustassya/pseuds/eustassya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s an open wound, and what did he do, he shoved wires and metal in there, a mechanical heart to replace the one he doesn’t need, doesn’t want. (Not that Tony Stark ever had a heart, in the first place.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. here is the deepest secret nobody knows

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, look, it's Stark again, with an _actual fic_ this time. It's gonna take, like, forever to write, because I'm a slow person and I have exams. (And I don't have a beta, so I have to edit and re-edit and re-edit over and over until I'm satisfied.)  
>  Why am I writing right before exams, you ask? No idea.
> 
>  
> 
> Anyways, many thanks to the wonderful [](https://www.beir.tumblr.com)beir for writing this idea in their tags! It's what triggered the whole idea of having Bucky and Tony bonding over their chronic pain caused by their metal parts. I hope this is what you were looking for.  
>  _Warnings and potential triggers are in the end notes._  
> 

The first thing he registers when he wakes is the heat. It's damp – humid, his brain supplies helpfully – and the air is stifling and musty and his mouth tastes something like blood and fear. The air holds a faint scent of gunpowder, coupled with familiar engine oil and metal. There's another smell in the air, too, but he can't seem to place it. It’s invasive, and unfamiliar, and it makes the hair at the back of his neck stand on edge. Pungent yet cloyingly sweet, probably some sort of Afghan men’s perfume, or something. Which means he's still in Afghanistan, with any luck. Maybe someone will come for him.

 

“Fuck,” he groans. It feels like someone replaced the back of his throat with sandpaper. He coughs quietly, breathless, drifts slowly into consciousness, squints at the dim ceiling of his prison. His chest hurts a little, the kind of numb pain you feel when you hit a bone funny.  _ Where exactly is this _ , the billionaire wonders as he tries to sit up. Pain shoots up the entirety of his torso, streaking through his ribs and stabbing at his chest, and he gasps, painful breaths ripping their way into his lungs.

 

"I see you're awake," a voice calls from somewhere else in the cave –  _ how does he know it's a cave? _ – and –  _ it's Yinsen, he knows it's Yinsen _ – and he looks down and sees the wires coming out of his chest, the car battery that he's living on, his borrowed time.  _ Why _ , he wants to ask.  _ Why did you sacrifice yourself for me. Don't I already have enough blood on my hands? _

 

They go through the same thing, again, over and over and over, every night, Afghanistan and the Arc Reactor and Yinsen, always dying, always sacrificing himself, always, always, always. "Don't waste your life, Stark." He gets up and he builds the first suit and he plans their escape, and he watches the light go from Yinsen's eyes, again and again and  _ again _ , and— 

 

“So you’re a man who has everything… and nothing,” Yinsen’s voice echoes in his head, and Tony jerks awake, fingers twisting in the Egyptian cotton sheets. "Fuck," he breathes, and it feels like someone replaced the back of his throat with sandpaper, all over again. He grips at the Egyptian cotton sheets, cold sweat pooling in the dip of his neck, and manages to croak, "JARVIS, time."

 

"Zero-three-two-nine, sir. The date is the nineteenth of August, the year is two-thousand-and-eight. It is currently raining..." he lets JARVIS wash the numbers and statistics over him, and Tony slowly tunes out of the drip-drip-drip of water in a cave and into the pitter-patter of raindrops on the windows. It's still dark outside, he realises when he pushes the curtains apart. The city of New York sprawls across the landscape below, reaching to the tips of the horizon.

 

Lights dance and blink up at him from below, the hard lines of his city softened by the water running down his reinforced glass walls. The first thing he registers when he's back in 2008 again is the pain. 

 

His fingers drum against his chest habitually, against the arc reactor, and he winces at the unsettling feeling of something moving in his chest, shifting ever-so-slightly with every tap of his fingers against the cool metal. The reactor doesn’t hurt him, not really, it’s just… there. Constant. It aches, is what it does, a constant circle of pain in the middle of his chest the size of the mini-reactor, like a raw wound that never heals. In a way, that's exactly what it is - a wound, a  _ hole in his chest, for god's sake, it’s going to kill him one day _ \- he fights back the rising panic. It’s an open wound, and what did he do, he shoved wires and metal in there, a mechanical heart to replace the one he doesn’t need, doesn’t want. (Not that Tony Stark ever had a heart, in the first place.)

 

Slow breaths.

 

In, out, in, out, and repeat. 

 

"Heart rate at normal levels, sir," JARVIS says, and thank god for his AI, wonderful creation that he is. Tony inhales, slowly, wheezing breaths going in, out. In, out. He can breathe, he tells himself. He  _ can _ . 

 

And so he lives, just like that, nightmares every night and phantom voices in his head every day, trying to shut down the weapons department of SI and focus the company on clean energy technology, and ( _ Obie please, I know what I'm doing, I’m not a  _ kid _ anymore— _ ) and, and making a suit, or two, or ten, an army, just to be safe. 

 

And he breathes, he does, even as Obie pulls the arc reactor out of his chest ( _ takes his  _ literal heart _ out of his  _ literal chest _ , is he trying to kill him, he is, oh god, he's trying to kill him, Obie his best friend, his father figure, his– his— _ ), even as he breaks up with Pepper ( _ he couldn’t make it work, could he, he never makes anything work but his stupid, stupid robots, and even those are useless _ ), even as he drowns himself in alcohol, day and night. (He's becoming his father, he thinks, and that in itself brings on a new surge of panic. Hey, look, another bottle to quash the nausea.) But he breathes, he does, stubborn man that he is.

 

He breathes through it all, everything, the pain in his chest a constant, almost comforting presence now. It helps, grounds him to Earth sometimes, when he closes his eyes and all he can see is the stars and the explosion, all the Chitauri, the armies and aliens and everything out to get them. The pain, it reminds him he’s alive, and this is real. It’s all real.

 

Maybe he deserves it, he thinks belatedly one afternoon, in the workshop with a bottle of whiskey. Maybe he deserves the torture in Afghanistan, deserves the bleeding wound in his chest that's sealed tight with metal. Maybe he deserves everything that's happened. It makes sense, after all – he has to atone for his sins. That's the last thing he remembers, before he passes out. His sins. All that blood on his hands - the people he couldn’t save, the people killed by his weapons, soldiers, civilians, innocent people.

 

The first thing he registers when he wakes, this time, is the pain.

 

"Are you trying to kill yourself." Is what Pepper says when she comes in, and he blinks. Her eyes are red, bloodshot, and there are eye bags underneath. She looks awful, yet at the same time just as beautiful as she had been not-so-long ago, when they were together. Tony smiles crookedly, tries to sit up. It hurts. He sits up anyways. Grins like nothing's wrong. ( _ But nothing's right _ , his mind interrupts, and he tells it pointedly to shut up.)

 

"C’mon, Pep, don't say that. Why would I, anyways? People need me in the world of the living, honey." He tries joking, smiles, but it’s strained and he knows it, and he knows Pepper knows, because she’s known him for so long, and he could never fool her with his masks. Predictably, Pepper frowns, but he can see the shimmer of relief in those blue, blue eyes. The two of them dance around the elephant in the room, shove it into a corner and pretend it isn’t there.

 

“Of course, what would Stark Industries be without you,” Pepper says drily, and Tony chuckles. The air gets stuck about halfway through, and he chokes. Coughs. Wet and painful, ragged breaths wracking through his lungs. Pepper startles, kind of panics, really, and rushes over to help him sit up, thumps his back helpfully. “Still having the breathing issues, Tony?” She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, and Tony feels like he’s let her down. (He’s always letting her down.)

 

It takes years, but eventually he manages to rebuild himself again. He does it slowly, bit by bit, sets up a foundation made of shattered mirrors and empty bottles, lays brick over brick, builds a wall around himself, builds a castle, a fortress, a tower for the princess to hide away in. But he knows he’s no princess. If anything, it’s a prison, he supposes. A prison for the part of him that allowed the thousands of deaths to happen in his name, that allowed Obie to sell off his creations to- to those people. He deserves it, he tells himself, over and over, until he believes himself. He deserves to be alone, whether it makes him lonely or not. There are things he has to make up for. There are things he can’t make up for. He has to try anyways.

  
There’s still blood on his hands, and death in his name, and the reactor is the only thing keeping him alive, but maybe if he can atone for his mistakes, he can feel okay again. (It’s the only thing that keeps him going.) He builds a suit and destroys his stolen tech, builds prosthetics and gives them to veterans for free, programs a vending machine that dispenses medication and puts them all over third-world countries, donates and donates to charity, to orphanages, to anyone who needs it, tries to make the world betterbetterbetter. And he smiles for the cameras, pretends the nightmares don’t come at night. Nobody needs to know he’s falling apart on the inside.


	2. here is the root of the root

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony meets Bucky in a pub and takes an interest in his metal arm. Also, palladium poisoning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally crapped out the second chapter, yay. Please tell me what y'all think about it so I can improve in the next chapter!
> 
> Also : my Bucky is really OOC I'm so sorry - I've never written Bucky before.
> 
> Enjoy!

And then, this : palladium poisoning. 

 

He doesn’t tell Pepper, no sir, she doesn’t need to worry about this, doesn’t need to worry about  _ him,  _ not any more than she already has. He doesn’t tell Rhodey either, doesn’t tell anyone, actually, just keeps it to himself, desperately searches for a cure, tries everything, everyone, and comes up with a blank. Panics. Makes something to keep himself alive for the moment, a medicine, of sorts. ( _ He’s getting a taste of his own medicine _ , a part of his minds says, and he laughs and he laughs and agrees.) 

 

The palladium levels in his blood go down when he drinks the medicine, but they don’t stay down. It’s always a little higher than before, every time. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he acknowledges that he’s slowly dying, but it isn’t until he hears the words ‘ _ palladium in the chest _ ’ that it hits home. He’s  _ dying _ . Oh, god, not again.

 

Wrought iron green creeps through his veins, all over his chest, his shoulders, up the side of his neck, and it  _ hurts _ . It burns like nothing else, a searing heat in his, in his body, right under his skin. He’s tired, always so tired, but he can’t sleep. Night time is always the worst, because for some reason it gets harder to breathe, harder than usual anyways. “The palladium,” he says out loud one day, in the middle of building yet another suit, “It’s killing me from the inside.” And it’s true, he’s not lying, he really isn’t. That’s the part that scares him the most. 

 

To hide it, he wears turtlenecks and scarves and high-collared shirts, and nobody notices anything wrong, just assume he’s being the eccentric genius Tony Stark they think they know, assume he’s wearing scarves indoors simply because he can, and that’s good. He grins when people ask, and makes a quip about.. about something, something smart, and people laugh it off. Nobody can tell, not really, and if Pepper asks him why he looks so tired and unwell, that’s not really any of her business anymore, is it?

 

Pepper doesn’t live with him now, and neither does anyone else, and the mansion echoes with all the silence in it. It’s good. Nobody’s there to worry about him, to risk their lives simply because of his bad decisions, which is good. It’s all good. It’s under control. He’s got this. (The irony is, he hasn’t got anything, anymore.  _ A man who has everything, and nothing _ , he thinks.  _ How fitting. _ )

 

* * *

 

His homemade blood palladium tester reads 62.8%. Dummy makes the moss drink (disgusting) and manages not to add motor oil in it, which in and of itself is a miracle. It’s essential to his continued survival, he knows, but still… Tony eyes the bottle hesitantly. He sticks his thumb on the blood palladium tester again, and it reads 67.4%. “It is highly recommended that you consume the drink within thirty minutes, Sir,” JARVIS reminds him firmly, and he sighs. The drink itself is more of a last-ditch attempt to keep the effects of the palladium poisoning at bay than anything else, concocted after he’d tried everything and everyone he knew for a cure.  _ The drink’s borrowed time _ , he thinks,  _ just like that battery in that cave, back then.  _ He downs the drink, finishes the entire bottle within a minute. Grips the bottle tight, like it’s a lifeline, like he’s drowning. (He kind of is, in a way.) JARVIS makes a noise that sounds something like disturbed but concerned.

 

* * *

 

Tonight, he decides to drag himself out of the mansion. It’s empty, way too empty, and every silent room and soundless corridor brings back memories he  _ doesn’t want to remember, damn it. ‘ _ There’s this great drinking place in Brooklyn, he recalls someone saying once, ‘called Georgie’s Corner.’ He looks it up and it does look, nice, actually. It’s a small quiet pub run by a group of veterans, and it’s in an area that’s less-well-known enough that nobody would suspect him of going there. After all, the public does know him as loud and attention-seeking. “J, we’re going out,” he says, and goes down to the workshop, where all his cars are.

 

He takes the Chevrolet, simply because it’s the nearest to the elevator and he really doesn’t think it’s a good idea to walk any more than he has to. “Your palladium tester, sir,” JARVIS reminds him, and he sighs and shoves the damn thing in his pocket. JARVIS puts the car on auto-drive, bless him, and Tony watches as the scenery passes by. He catches himself before he can start thinking he’s going to miss this. It’s a painful thought, and he wonders if this is how cancer patients feel, sometimes.

 

They make it to Georgie’s Corner sometime around 11. The place is surprisingly empty on the inside, only a few people sitting at the tables talking in hushed voices, the lights dimmed down so he can’t make out anyone else’s face, and there’s a gentle tune playing on the speakers. It takes him a while to realise it’s Russian, and also nothing he’s ever heard before. Mental note, Russian music. He slips over to the bar and gets himself a whiskey, and the bartender raises an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t comment. The whiskey he gets is actually good stuff, not the crap he usually gets in.. other places. Tony decides he likes this place.

 

A couple hours and a lot of drinks later, he starts talking. It’s not his fault, not really, that he can’t keep his mouth shut for extended periods of time. He’s noticed the guy two seats away, and the way his left arm glints and shines in the dim lighting. It’s like his eyes are glued to the thing, he can’t seem to look away. It’s mesmerising, okay, he hasn’t seen such a beautiful piece of engineering since… well, since his series of prosthetics. He can’t really tell from afar, but this guy’s arm is definitely not one of his models. It’s something new, and that’s really exciting, because he wants to take it apart and figure out how it works and make it  _ better _ . Metal Arm Guy turns to look at him with an almost disbelieving smile, and that’s when he realises he’s just said that entire internal monologue out loud. Whoops.

 

So Metal Arm Guy (yes, he’s calling him that now) thinks he’s weird. Okay, big deal. He turns back to his drink, cheeks reddening, because he’s on the wrong side of tipsy and in this state he’s actually capable of being embarrassed. That’s when he realises Metal Arm Guy’s right beside him, on his right, and that’s weird, wasn’t he on the left, like, a second ago? Up close, he realises that the guy’s arm isn’t the only attractive thing about him. Metal Arm Guy’s got dark hair down to his shoulders, and bangs that hang down over his forehead, soft and silky-looking. His skin’s surprisingly pale for a soldier, and his eyes are this shade of grey-blue that changes with the light’s angle. Tony only averts his gaze when he realises he’s looking right into the man’s eyes, which, okay, is admittedly weird, but he gets to be weird, because he’s  _ rich and a genius _ ,  _ hello _ .

 

“Huh,” he says, staring at the arm that’s right there is all its beautiful metal glory. It doesn’t look like any metal he’s ever seen before, and he’s seen pretty much everything. “What’s it made of?” he finds himself asking, and Metal Arm Guy chuckles. It’s a very nice chuckle, quiet but deep, and kinda… throaty? Whatever, his higher brain functions have been shot to hell already anyways, he shouldn’t be expected to be able to communicate with people. “I have no idea, actually. There wasn’t much of a choice for me to make there.” comes the reply, with a bitter undertone that piques Tony’s interest instantly.

 

“So what happened with that arm, huh?” he asks, an eyebrow raised, and the bartender looks up to watch them, curious as well. Metal Arm Guy looks kinda… constipated, Tony thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. Maybe he’s just trying to word it properly, whatever he’s about to say.

 

“Long story short,” Metal Arm Guy says finally, taking a drink of his beer, “I got kidnapped and brainwashed by this Nazi organisation while I was fighting in the war, got my injured arm amputated and replaced with this,” he raises his left arm slightly, “while I was unconscious. When I got rescued, they didn’t know what to do about it, so they just.. left it, I guess. It works, at least.” Tony nods, and runs a hand over it gently. The guy hides his wince well, but Tony catches it, because it was what he was looking for. He takes his hand away and sips at his whiskey.

 

“Does it hurt?” he asks, subconsciously raising a hand to rub at the area around his arc reactor. Of course it hurts, to have a part of your body cut out and replaced with metal and wires. He knows that, has experienced it firsthand. Metal Arm Guy nods a little, shrugging. “You get used to it after a while, I guess.” And Tony gets that, he really does, so he says so. That earns him a raised eyebrow and a questioning look. Before he can stop himself, the words are spilling out of his mouth. 

 

“I’ve got this thing in my chest,” he starts. “It keeps the shrapnel in my chest from cutting through my coronaries and giving me a heart attack.” He doesn’t mention the palladium poisoning, though, even though the guy doesn’t seem to recognise him at all. (Which is weird, because he’s all over the TV these days, but he’s honestly too drunk to care at this point.) Nobody needs to know he’s dying from the inside out.

  
He doesn’t remember when exactly he passes out, but he does remember getting sick as hell, and a pair of warm hands on his back as he pukes his guts out into the pub’s toilet. He recalls getting dragged out into the street, cold night air biting at his flushed cheeks, and getting pushed gently into a cab. He vaguely registers an exasperated sigh and blue-grey eyes, and a soft bed. Little bits and snippets that he hopes will make sense in the morning.


	3. and the bud of the bud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Morning After, and coincidentally, the start of their strange friendship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea where I'm going with this fic, so uh, bear with me? I'm thinking of introducing Steve in the next chapter.

The sleep he gets that night is good because it’s uninterrupted by nightmares, and it’s relieving, not having to face his past in his sleep for once. His dreams are of sweet nothingness, he just closes his eyes for a moment, and opens them again to realise that he’d fallen asleep. This is what he’s missed, really, being unconscious and just, letting his body rest. No haunting dreams, no nightmares that leave him terrified and gasping for air. Except… 

 

When he comes to again, he has the distinct feeling that he’s not in his own bed. For one, the bedsheets are most definitely not Egyptian cotton, and the cold air that brushes over his skin smells like rain and freshly-cut leaves, not that weird air freshener JARVIS likes to circulate in his room. And the bed just doesn’t smell like him, okay, and it doesn’t smell like sex, which is, well, he doesn’t know if that’s good news or bad news, honestly. It’s too early to be thinking about things.

 

As it turns out, he’s in a stranger’s room, because he opens his eyes, and he knows for a fact that his ceiling has a giant digital clock stuck to it that tells him the date and the time (down to the seconds) and the temperature outside, and this one is, well, blank. And white. And the paint is kinda peeling. His ceiling is actually a really pale red and gold pattern, but nobody knows that. The window (which is definitely not his, his room’s walls are made of glass and so he has no windows) is open, so that’s where the wind came from, and there are blinds drawn to block out the late morning sunlight. The bed beneath him is soft and warm, though, and if he’s alive this morning that means whoever owns this bed hasn’t tried to kill him yet. Getting up and facing the shitty day he knows is coming can wait. 

 

He snuffles a little, and burrows into the blankets. They smell a little bit like cigarette smoke and a lot like old books, and this aftershave that he recognises from somewhere. It’s nice, and comfortable, and he likes it. Maybe he’ll find out what brand of aftershave that is and use it instead of the expensive, rich-smelling one that his personal hairdresser insists on him using. Jan’s always been a little crazy about rich-smelling things, anyways.

 

His head’s throbbing like hell, though, so that train of thought doesn’t matter, and thank god the room is dark and there isn’t any sunlight to kill his delicate eye cells or whatever.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, move over,” a voice murmurs from somewhere above him sometime later, and wow, he hadn’t noticed anyone had come in, and he hadn’t noticed that he’d fallen asleep again, but he complies anyway, as a thank-you to the person for being quiet. It’s a male voice, which, okay, that’s even newer than the fact that the bed doesn’t smell like sweat and other fluids. He’d never picked up a  _ guy _ before, even though he knew he was attracted to men as well as women. The bed dips beside him, and he lifts his head a little, cracking an eye open to look up at the person whose bed he’s currently residing in. Later, he will deny on virtue of his life that he did not let out a squeak, but  _ wow _ , the guy’s really attractive. Okay. So he picked up a hot guy while drunk at a tiny pub in Brooklyn, and now he’s lying half-naked in said hot guy’s bed. Did he mention earlier that he’s half naked? Because he doesn’t have his pants. Now that he thinks about it, he vaguely remembers Hot Guy’s face, and those eyes look really really familiar, but he can’t exactly place where. God, how drunk did he get? 

 

“Uh,” he says, as eloquent as he gets in the morning before coffee. “Did we, ah…” Then he kinda wants to hit himself in the face, or maybe die of embarrassment, yeah, because Hot Guy just  _ looks at him _ , then chuckles and shakes his head incredulously. It’s a nice laugh, he thinks, and tries to smile back, but his traitorous head decides to start spinning. He groans, and Hot Guy looks worried for a second, but after Tony manages to mumble ‘coffee’ he gets up and disappears out the doorway. Huh. Hot Guy returns with a mug of coffee, though, god bless his kind soul, and- he’s really got to get his name.

 

“James,” the guy supplies, and Tony realises he’d said it out loud. Dammit, he needs to install a brain-to-mouth filter inside him somehow. One of these days. He nods and sits up slowly and reaches for the coffee, sighing in contentment when he takes a sip of it. Ah, yes. Espresso. His one and only true love. “But people call me Bucky,” the guy - James, or, well, Bucky - continues, sitting on the bed beside him again. “Feeling better this morning, buttercup?”

 

Tony quirks an eyebrow at the endearment, wondering for a moment if he’s still asleep and this guy is some manifestation of his darkest deepest desires. Which, admittedly, do include hot brunettes with great laughs, but  _ still _ . This is one odd morning after. He nods in reply anyways, and Bucky smiles, amused. Maybe it’s because he’s still hungover and his chest is flipping its shit again with the grating pain and he can’t exactly breathe ( _ that might be because Bucky’s taking his breath away, shut up brain, he can think cheesy pickup lines to himself while feeling like death if he wants to _ ), but he decides that he’d build Bucky a better metal arm, if he wanted. (He’s not usually this weird the morning after, he swears.) “So uh,” he tries again, because he’s actually half-coherent now, thanks, coffee. “Did we… you know…?”

 

“No.” Bucky says, soft and gentle. “Don’t swing that way.” And Tony can’t help but feel a little stab of disappointment at that, (because hey, who wouldn’t want to fuck this guy? he’s so _ hot,  _ and he looks like he could pin you to the bed with like, one hand) but he plows on with a quirk of his lips and a suggestive tone. 

 

“What, men? Sex?”

 

“No, one-night stands. I don’t do no-strings-attached, not anymore.”

 

That still doesn’t explain his lack of pants, so he says, “That doesn’t explain my lack of pants.” Bucky, laughs, his voice rich and throaty. Huh. He doesn’t really get what’s so amusing about him not having pants and saying so, but okay. To each his own. “You took them off,” Bucky explains eventually, still chuckling. “In the cab, last night. And you threw them out the window.” Well then. Thank god his things were in his jacket pockets. Speaking of which.

 

“Hey, where’s my jacket? And… my shirt.” Because his brain chooses that moment to actually come online, he realises then that he’s dressed only in his boxers and a faded red shirt with long sleeves, which isn’t at all what he was wearing last night. Oh, he definitely has to get Bucky to tell him what happened last night. To his surprise, Bucky actually doesn’t kick him out, for the morning at least. He makes Tony blueberry pancakes and drowns them in maple syrup (delicious), makes him more coffee, and tells him the general sequence of events from Last Night.

 

From what he gathers from Bucky, he’d gotten shitfaced in record time, and was already halfway there by the time Bucky went in. They had “chatted for a while”, apparently, which to Tony is the equivalent of ‘you kept babbling about science and technology and I couldn’t get you to shut up’. And Tony’d kept it up with the whiskey till he got drunk enough to get a few shots, and then he’d decided that since he was man enough to take shots, he was man enough to take a rainbow shot, of which he managed to finish about two colours before puking up the contents of his stomach. Being the great person he is, Bucky decided that Tony should probably go home. 

 

Tony doesn’t know this yet, but after that, his life’s about to change, and probably for the better. He also doesn’t know that he’d told Bucky about the arc reactor, because Bucky had said something along the lines of “we chatted for a while”, So, there’s that. He does let Bucky lend him a pair of sweatpants, though, and drive him back to the pub on his motorbike, and then they say their goodbyes and Tony goes back to the empty mansion and Bucky goes… wherever he has to go. Pepper’s probably going to kill him for skipping out on this morning’s shareholders meeting, but he’s in a good mood now and he’s pretty sure nothing can ruin it.

 

And that should be the end of things between him and Bucky, but apparently someone up there has other ideas.

 

* * *

 

Another two weeks pass before he pulls himself out of his latest working stint, finishes all the paperwork for the day, and makes a last-minute decision not to go back to the mansion for the night. Instead, he finds himself going back to that pub in Brooklyn, the name ‘James’ on the tip of his tongue. Bucky’s not there when he arrives, but to be fair, he’s there pretty early in the evening. He spends an hour or two sipping at his whiskey and fiddling with repulsor schematics on his phone, and then he hears the door open, and footsteps, and a familiar voice beside him, asking for a beer. Tony smiles to himself and takes another sip from his third glass.

 

“Hey there, soldier,” he says casually, looking up from his screen to stare into pale blue eyes. He’d mistaken then for blue-grey at first, but now that he’s not drunk he realises they’re actually an interestingly faded shade of blue, so it’d be easy to understand why they’d seemed greyish under the right light. Relative color, and all that. Pepper told him about it once. Beautiful, perfect Pepper, who he couldn’t make things work with. 

 

Anyways, Bucky’s got really nice eyes, and there’s something about them that catches his eye, something interesting, and dark, like there are things the man has seen that are locked away, hidden. Bucky’s eyes had imprinted on him from the moment they had met, and now that he’s looking into them again, he can’t really bring himself to look away. 

 

Maybe that’s why he’s startled out of his thoughts when Bucky slips into the seat beside him and smirks, countering his greeting with a pat on his shoulder and a “Miss me, buttercup?” Tony adamantly refuses to admit that he chokes on his drink then, even if no one says he did. His face flushes a ‘cute shade of red’ (Bucky’s words, not his), and it’s purely out of surprise, he swears.

  
And that’s where their odd little friendship starts, in a little pub on the outskirts of Brooklyn, Tony cracking jokes and explaining science and avoiding responsibilities, and Bucky sharing his experiences in a war from a lifetime ago. It’s not exactly what he’d imagined when he woke up in Bucky’s bed, but it’s not exactly a bad thing, either.

**Author's Note:**

> Potential triggers :  
> \- slightly suicidal thoughts  
> \- nightmares of Afghanistan (no torture, just guilt)


End file.
